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Category: finance – Page 144

Sad for Russia.

President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials dream of a technological leap that could immediately close the gap between Russia and more advanced economies, as Sputnik did for the Soviet Union. The hyperloop, a kind of train in a tube that can reach speeds of up to 700 mph, fits that dream, and a well-connected Russian businessman has invested in it — only to see the project become embroiled in a lawsuit involving a Silicon Valley startup’s founders and claims of financial mismanagement.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, proposed the hyperloop four years ago. This “fifth mode of transport” would involve a system of practically airless tubes through which magnetically levitated pods could carry passengers and cargo. Musk has not set up a company to bring the project to reality, but others have. For example, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, wants to build a system in Slovakia. Another, Hyperloop One, offered a public demonstration of some elements of its technology in May.

Hyperloop One has seemed the most advanced project, and Russian investors showed an interest from the start. The state-owned Russian Direct Investment Fund took a small stake in the company, but Ziyavudin Magomedov, head of Summa Capital, was the most enthusiastic Russian investor, putting up money for both of the company’s funding rounds.

Continue reading “Russia’s hyperloop dream is undone” | >

Nice chime on QC.

Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV (TEF), a $100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space.

Saxena is also the chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio branch and Chairman, SparkCognition an Austin based cognitive security and safety analytics company.

Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world’s first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. Earlier he founded, built and sold two Austin based software startups.

Continue reading “Manoj Saxena talks Artificial Intelligence with Gigaom” | >

Nice.

Networks are mathematical representations to explore and understand diverse, complex systems—everything from military logistics and global finance to air traffic, social media, and the biological processes within our bodies. In each of those systems, a hierarchy of recurring, meaningful internal patterns—such as molecules and proteins interacting inside cells, and capacitors and resistors operating within integrated circuits—determines the functions or behaviors of those systems. The larger and more intricate a system is, however, the harder it is for current network modeling techniques to uncover these patterns and represent them in organized, easy-to-understand ways.

Researchers at Stanford University, funded by DARPA’s Simplifying Complexity in Scientific Discovery (SIMPLEX) program, have made progress in overcoming these challenges through a framework they have developed for identifying and clustering what mathematicians call “motifs”: essential but often obscure patterns within systems that are the building blocks of mathematical modeling and that facilitate the computational representation of complex systems.

A research paper describing the team’s achievement was published in Science (“Higher-order organization of complex networks”). At the heart of the team’s success was the creation of algorithms that can automatically explore and prioritize the hidden patterns in data that are fundamental to explaining network structure and function.

Continue reading “Mathematical framework that prioritizes key patterns in networks aims to accelerate scientific discovery” | >

Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Apply here to join Singularity University, CNBC, and hundreds of the world’s most forward-thinking financial leaders at Exponential Finance in June 2017.

One day in the future, we’ll look back in wonder at how our physical objects used to be singular, disconnected pieces of matter.

We’ll be in awe of the fact that a car used to be just a piece of metal full of gears and belts that we would drive from one place to another, that a refrigerator was a box that kept our food cold — and a phone was a piece of plastic we used to communicate to one other person at a time.

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In Russia, not all scientific projects get financial backing from the government — but teleportation does.

On June 22, a special interagency working group, along with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, discussed the country’s scientific and technological plans drawn up by the Russian Strategic Initiatives Agency.

The document, described in detail by Kommersant newspaper, lists innovations Russian scientists plan to accomplish by 2035. Among them are a Russia-based coding language, a 5G mobile network, “smart” buildings, medical implants — and teleportation.

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Whether referred to as AI, machine learning, or cognitive systems, such as IBM Watson, a growing cadre of business leaders is embracing this opportunity head on.

That’s because their consumers are using cognitive applications on a daily basis — through their phones, in their cars, with their doctors, banks, schools, and more. All of this consumer engagement is creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. And thanks to IT infrastructures designed for cognitive workloads — that can understand, reason, and learn from all this data — organizations and entire industries are transforming and reaping the benefits.

What’s important to remember is that this sci-fi-turned-reality-show of cognitive computing cannot happen without the underlying systems on which the APIs, software, and services run. For this very reason, today’s leading CIOs are thinking differently about their IT infrastructure.

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Spectroscopy studies of charge transfer from cadmium selenide quantum dots to molecular nickel catalysts reveal unexpectedly fast electron transfer, enabling exceptional photocatalytic hydrogen production.

A key challenge facing the US is the harvesting, production, storage, and distribution of energy to support economic prosperity with responsible environmental management. Currently, fossil fuels provide more than 80% of the energy consumed in the US (even when significant increases in the use of alternative sources of energy in recent years are accounted for).1 For the US Department of Defense in particular, volatility in the price and availability of fossil fuels leads to significant short- and long-term financial, operational, and strategic risks.2 There is, therefore, clearly a need for new alternative sources of energy.

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Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Apply here to join Singularity University, CNBC, and hundreds of the world’s most forward-thinking financial leaders at Exponential Finance in June 2017.

Modern life is punctuated by market cycles.

One year the gears of commerce are whirring along. Businesses are hiring and investing. People are buying houses and cars, televisions and computers. Things are going great. Then a year later, the gears screech to halt—sweeping layoffs, plummeting investment, and crashing markets. No one’s buying anything.

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